Thursday, February 19, 2004

 Contact: Bob Warick
Executive Director
University College of the Fraser Valley
Community Relations and Development
Phone: 604-864-4611
Email: warick@ucfv.ca

With new funding awarded by the University College of the Fraser Valley, two collaborative projects based in Surrey and Abbotsford will work together to help kids throughout the Fraser Region at risk of entering foster care.  

Called Wraparound – Families Building Community, the projects will use comprehensive ‘wraparound’ case management, an approach gaining attention throughout North America. The projects will create care teams made up of experts and community members to support and listen to the needs of families and find safe and lasting ways to reduce the number of children in care.  

Abbotsford Community Services, along with its community partners, will receive $57,600, and The Children’s Foundation, along with Act II Community Services and other partners in Surrey, will receive $57,788. The funding will come from UCFV’s Fraser Children and Family Development Fund, which was created with funding from BC’s Ministry of Children and Family Development.  

“This is back to: it takes a community to raise a child,” says Stacie Prescott, Manager of Counselling, Youth and Family Support Services for Abbotsford Community Services. “Wraparound is about giving families back their voice, and appreciating the role played by neighbours, coaches, friends from church and other people families trust to support them.” 

Full-time wraparound facilitators will be hired to carry out the projects. Over a period of nearly a year, the two projects will offer a small group of client families whose children are either at risk of entering care, in voluntary care or temporary custody arrangements, the option of working with a ‘wraparound’ care team made up of community mentors and experts to develop informal supports and non-professional services.  

“Family Crisis comes from a mix of things,” says Christine Mohr, Operations Manager for The Children’s Foundation. “For a multitude of reasons, such as poverty, poor health, a lack of education, isolation from the community, parents can find themselves without the means to address the needs of the family. This project looks not just at the problems, but at the strengths, individual and collective, that can be developed to help families. It looks at developing the informal supports and an informal network of people who will be around to help the family long after social services has pulled out.” 

Ms. Mohr stresses that ‘wraparound’ works by finding out what parents and children really need and trying to provide support to them in flexible ways. She says in some cases, providing a mother bus fare to visit a child in temporary care or paying for sports activities for children and youth may help more than formal programs such as family counselling. 

The project will be closely monitored and carefully evaluated by Abbotsford Community Services and The Children’s Foundation along with other partnering agencies to determine best practices for the future in the Fraser Region.  

The Wraparound – Families Building Community projects are two of the many community-based, collaborative projects providing aid to children and families in the Fraser Region to receive funding through UCFV’s Fraser Children and Family Development Fund. A total of $1 million has been awarded to projects throughout the region, which spans from Burnaby to Hope.   

The successful projects will pilot more effective approaches to a range of services for children, youth and families, with goals such as reducing the number of children in care, preventing youth from entering the justice system, and supporting children and families at risk. In partnering with UCFV, the Ministry of Children and Family Developments goal was to create an investment fund for evidence-based programs that promote the capacity of families and communities to protect children. 

For more information, please visit the website at www.ucfv.ca/fraserfund  

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